Black History month seemed to be the perfect time to read Deborah Johnson’s “The Secret of Magic”. Set in Mississippi, 1945, the novel tells the story of the race relation battles that raged in the South after World War II.
War hero Joe Howard is coming home from Europe to his small town of Revere, Mississippi. Only hours from home after a long bus ride, he and other black passengers are asked to give up their seats for a few German POWs, but he refuses. Days later, his dead body is found.
Thousands of miles away, Regina Robichaud is facing discrimination of her own as a young, black, female lawyer working at the NAACP for Thurgood Marshall in New York City. When she hears about Joe Howard she convinces her mentor to let her head south to investigate the case.
The novel follows her investigation, the role that M.P. Calhoun, the reclusive author of Robichaud’s favourite childhood book, plays in the story, and the muddy waters of racism and town secrets in the postwar deep South.
The story is beautifully written, combining a murder mystery with mystical realism set in the forests of the area. The characters are well-developed and Regina is a voice for the time. I particularly enjoyed following her as she uncovered that the race relations of the South, which at first appear to be so black and white (pardon the pun), are actually nuanced with all colours in between.
“Regina glanced down, because this was obviously expected. The photograph was an old-timey black-and-white photograph with people stiff in front of the camera…Black and white, but Regina had been long enough in Mississipi to know that the colour was there. Pink in that corner of hanging crepe myrtle, brown spots on a dog; white and more white in that brush of cotton that grew all the way up to the door.”
Reading about the personal relationships of the Revere townspeople gave me a deeper understanding of the complexities of racism not only in the American South, but also in the rest of the country, and the emergence of the civil rights movement in the postwar decades.
“The Secret of Magic” is a good novel, but more importantly it’s an important novel, and one that leaves me with a better understanding of the personalities in this book and of humanity in general.
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